Archive for Items Categorized 'US', only excerpts shown, click title for full entry.

Total Performers: Ford Drag Racing in the 1960s

by Charles R. Morris

If you think a Velvet Brute is an umbrella drink you’d better read this book, quick. Written by someone who drove those cars in that decade the book offers an authentic look at a very unusual era marked, not least, by a Chevy v Ford debate on full boil.

Montier’s French Racing Fords

by Chris Martin

Carroll Shelby wasn’t the first to take Ford to Le Mans, French Ford dealer Charles Montier was—forty years earlier, in the form of a hopped-up Model T!

Motorama: GM’s Legendary Show and Concept Cars

by David W. Temple

In the 1950s and ‘60s, if you couldn’t make it to the car show, GM would bring its cars to a big city near you in the form of a rolling auto show replete with specially made “dream cars” for just this event.

Show Rod Model Kits: A Showcase of America’s Wildest Model Kits

by Scotty Gosson

The wacky world of wacky kit cars is on full display here. Hot rods were once on the fringe—now they’re at Pebble Beach. Kit building is a great hobby, especially if you have the skills to color outside the lines.

The Little Bastards

by Jim Lindsay

Blue collar boys yearning for the fast lane. Trading their bicycles for hot rods they experience beer, women, racing, male bonding, and assorted drama. A fictional story—but you know people who lived just that story.

The English Model T Ford

by Barker, Tuckett, Lilleker

This book could interest a wider audience than the title suggests as it covers a variety of subjects. The emphasis is on non-factory special bodies.

Inside Shelby American

by John Morton

Morton’s story illustrates nothing more than that being in the right place at the right time really does matter. Not every janitor becomes a pro racer in the shop he once swept! Nor does every chicken farmer hatch a racing emporium.

Corvette – 
America’s Star-Spangled 
Sports Car

by Karl Ludvigsen

Only in its current iteration—61 years after its launch!—is the Corvette a legitimate sports car. How this piece of Americana got there is explored by a book fittingly launched on the 4th of July.

American Motors Corporation

by Patrick R. Foster

What started as the largest merger of car companies in US history had an ignominious end. Undeserved, the author says. Such much is AMC part of US culture that a 2008 car magazine touted the firm’s revival—only to be debunked as a cruel April Fool’s joke.

Austin und Willys aus Berlin

by Klaus Gebhardt

You didn’t know that this quintessential American maker made cars in Germany? Not to worry—few seem to! This book will fix that.

Autowork

by Robert Asher and Ronald Edsforth (Editors) 

What’s life like on the “inside” for the men and women who make cars in the US? From the early days up to the 1980s, these essays paint a not so rosy picture of the conditions at work and, by extension, at home.

The 1924 Coolidge-Dawes Lincoln Tour

by Larry Krug

Eyewitness accounts from an epic US presidential campaign that covered thousands of miles by road, involved over 100,000 vehicles, and reached millions of people—in 1924, when passable roads where still a novelty.